So You Want To Be On Tv? Here's A Harsh Reality

Andy Warhol didn't foresee reality TV. If he had, he might have extended the 15 minutes of fame he predicted for everyone to an hour or more.

At the current rate, everyone in America should eventually get a shot to appear on one of these TV shows, or at least be asked. Eric Brandon has a couple of words of advice: Scream "No way!" Then run.

Brandon, for 20 years a disc jockey on "Majic" WMXJ, FM 102.7, wishes he'd done just that when he was approached about a year ago by the casting directors of ABC's Wife Swap. Instead he made the colossal blunder of agreeing to have his family participate. Their experience turned into a gothic horror story.

The concept of Wife Swap calls for two married women to leave their own families for a couple of weeks to head one another's households.

Brandon wound up inheriting the Goth-centric Jill, who had blood-red hair, lavish tattoos and a laissez-faire attitude. This might be fine for adults, but she carried it over to disciplining the children -- or not disciplining them. During the nearly two weeks she was supposed to be supervising Brandon's two step-daughters, then 11 and 16, she let them do whatever they wanted, Brandon said.

The Brandons have a household chore chart for the kids. Jill burned it. Personal hygiene became optional. Brandon tried to restore normalcy and was presented as an ogre.

When you film two families 16-18 hours a day for a couple of weeks, then have to boil it down to about 40 minutes of program time, what gets in is up to editors -- who generally want the subjects to fit into neat boxes, easily identifiable by the audience. Jill became the free-spirited heroine, Eric the hard-nosed bad guy.

"They got what they wanted, a real controversial SOB," Brandon said. To complete the picture, footage shot when Brandon still worked at Majic was inserted. What he said was harmless small talk with listeners was edited in a way to make him look like a flirtatious philanderer, Brandon said.

People who knew him for years were shocked. He had left the station by the time the show aired, so he didn't get to hear firsthand some of the nasty things callers said about him.

(This is nothing new for reality programs. Dr. Sean Kenniff of WFOR-Ch. 4, who was part of the cast of the original Survivor, tells of similar experiences. The CBS series decided to pigeonhole Kenniff as a goofy young doctor from Long Island. No matter what good things he did around camp, Kenniff says, all that got into the show were incidents that made him look like a goofy young doctor from Long Island.)

Jessica Brandon was having her own nightmare a couple of thousand miles away. Her new quarters with Jill's family were in Phoenix, but not in a part of town you would see in a Chamber of Commerce brochure. Jessica got a little queasy when she noticed an inordinate number of scruffy bikers hanging around. She was almost ready to bail when the car parked in front of her new home was a hearse. This turned out to be a sneak preview -- the dominant piece of furniture in the living room was a coffin. The walls were almost the same blood red as Jill's hair. "They had a fascination with death," Jessica said.

The shower was disgusting, the tub and toilet filthy, according to Jessica. "I was shaking and I welled up with tears."

Her new "mate," John, presented an intimidating picture. "He's 6-foot-2 but he has a Mohawk that makes him look 7 foot," Jessica said. The kids, 5-year-old Deuce and Raven, 12, also had the Goth look.

John drank beer from morning to night, Jessica said, and only worked part-time. "The producers urge you to be confrontational," Jessica said. So she told John she wanted him to work full-time, with overtime if it was available.

The producers used this to make her look mean and superficial, Jessica said.

Bottom line: The more traditional family was made to look bad, while the unconventional (to be charitable) clan came across as admirable.